"For all the mind-numbing buzz about Web. 2.0, most business collaboration and information sharing remains mired in endless e-mail strings and scheduled conference calls. More than half of business technology pros surveyed by InformationWeek are either skeptical about tools such as blogs, wikis, and online social networks, or they're willing but wary of adopting them. What gives?

The usual impediments. Business technologists are concerned about security, return on investment, and their staffs' skill in implementing and integrating new Web tools. "This group has been burned by being on the leading edge of technology."

And if its this hard for them to uptake Web 2.0 how on earth will they open up to Web 3.0?

See the post from Ian Davis below....

Via Semantic Bits

Interesting blog post from Ian Davis

"2007 is the make-or-break year for the Semantic Web. The specs are done. The tools are in place, and there’s still not a whiff of a killer app anywhere to be seen. The Achilles heel of the Semantic Web may well be the complete disinterest of most authors in producing anything remotely approximating metadata for their pages. Search engines have learned to ignore any user-created metadata because honest publishers don’t bother with it and dishonest spammers abuse it. Screen readers don’t even bother with the limited semantics already in HTML, trying instead to figure out what the page looks like."

Make or break for the Semantic Web

"The New York Times has launched its first regular user-generated content features.

On Wednesday, The Times launched a Share and View Photo Gallery on its Collectible Cars site that allows members to post photos and personal stories of their collectible cars and rate and post comments to other members’ collectible car submissions."

New York Times launches user generated features.

Picture courtesy of Experentia

"When Toyota Motor Corp. wanted to promote its new Scions to young buyers, it turned to one of the growing number of digital design companies doing business in the popular online universe "Second Life."

The firm, Millions of Us, conjured up Scion City - a futuristic urban island with a dealership that sells the cars and a racetrack where consumers' online personas can take them for virtual test drives.

"The goal is to build a community in 'Second Life' that is really engaged and really excited and really involved," said Reuben Steiger, 35, chief executive of Sausalito-based Millions of Us."

Virtual Designers busy in Online Worlds

Picture courtesy of Gigaom

[youtube s25fjjbDef4 nolink]

"The world's smallest radio frequency identification tags have been unveiled by Japanese electronics firm Hitachi. The minute devices measure just 0.05mm by 0.05mm (0.002x0.002in) and to the naked eye look like spots of powder. "

The picture shows the tags beside a human hair.

Via the BBC

Picture courtesy of the BBC.

"Researchers at Rutgers are leading an effort funded by the Department of Homeland Security to research techniques for monitoring social networks news articles, Web blogs and other social media for indicators of potential terrorist activity.

The Rutgers Center for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science will lead the team made up of researchers from the University of Southern California, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Pittsburgh. The group includes researchers from AT&T Laboratories, Bell Labs’/Lucent Technologies, Princeton University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Texas Southern University. Rutgers will get $1 million per year for three years. The DHS will fund the entire team $10.2 million over three years.”

Via Tim Finin

Thanks to Smita for the article

"An Egyptian court has sentenced a blogger to four years' prison for insulting Islam and the president. Abdel Kareem Soliman's trial was the first time that a blogger had been prosecuted in Egypt. He had used his web log to criticise the country's top Islamic institution, al-Azhar university and President Hosni Mubarak, whom he called a dictator. A human rights group called the verdict "very tough" and a "strong message" to Egypt's thousands of bloggers. Soliman, 22, was tried in his native city of Alexandria. He blogs under the name Kareem Amer."

Via the BBC

Photo courtesy of the BBC

"Our lives are becoming increasingly digitized—from the ways we communicate, to our entertainment media, to our e-commerce transactions, to our online research. As storage becomes cheaper and data pipes become faster, we are doing more and more online—and in the process, saving a record of our digital lives, whether we like it or not."

Interesting article on the evolution of our digital lives.

Picture courtesy of CIO-Weblog.

"The way we use the web is changing and the future lies in mixing, mash-ups and pipes, says columnist Bill Thompson.When the web was young we were happy just to see words and pictures on the screen in front of us.Since 1994 we have seen the web turn into an all-singing, all-dancing multimedia experience, with the simple page layouts we once delighted in replaced by interactive services and web-based tools, while embedded video is everywhere.
Anyone with an internet connection can have their own web site, whether a blog or a profile on MySpace, and photo and video sharing is becoming the standard way to share holiday snaps or family events.

And the quality of the experience has been enhanced by the move from a page-oriented model, where each site is collection of separate pages, to the services approach that underpins web 2.0.
Sites like Flickr and Google Maps don't load or reload pages, they use the browser to provide interaction with online data sources."

Via the BBC

picture courtesy of the BBC

"Virtual reality is being used to treat soldiers returning from Iraq with post-traumatic stress disorder.The immersive system combines realistic street scenes, sounds and odours to allow patients to relive traumatic events in a controlled environment.During the "exposure therapy", a clinician determines the intensity of the events the soldier experiences.The prototype system is currently being trialled in the US but has already successfully treated four volunteers."

Via the BBC

Picture courtesy of the BBC

Curriki, a play on the words 'curriculum' and 'wiki', is a nonprofit organization that is building the first and only Internet site for Open Source Curriculum (OSC), which will provide universal access to free curricula and instructional materials for grades K-12.Curriki, a nonprofit group that's trying to build a mega-Web site of educational materials that teachers, students and parents anywhere in the world can use, modify, critique and expand on. And they can do all that for free.

"There is no reason why in California (we) need to spend $400 million a year on textbooks when we can open-source. ... If we had half of the annual California textbook budget -- and we just need it one time -- we think we can become self-funding." -- he says.

Via Captsolo

Curriki

"Content Labels are files that contain powerful metadata that enable search engines and browsers to provide more trust in search results. They’re based on the W3C Semantic Web method called Resource Description Framework (RDF).

Content Labels act in a similar fashion to SSL Certificates. However, SSL Certificates are restricted to making claims about an entire Web site and they’re only used for security and identification purposes. Content Labels can be used to make assertions about an entire domain, or specific URIs. Furthermore, they can be used to make conformance claims to any standard or code of conduct."

Content labels

Photo courtesy of Pattersonlabels

John Breslin tries out Yahoo Pipes.

"So I created a basic pipe to take three feeds from Planet Journals, IrishBlogs.ie and awards.ie about the forthcoming Irish Blog Awards using the “Fetch” module. I then used their “For Each: Annotate” module to add a sioc:topic annotation, using the first matching result from a Yahoo! search for the phrase “Irish Blog Awards”. The graphical interface is very easy to use, and a screenshot of the pipe construction is shown on the left. You can see the pipe output on the right below; unfortunately the RSS 2.0 dump loses the sioc:topic annotation I added, but the JSON dump still retains it so with a bit of manipulation this could provide the appropriate RDF."

Via Cloudlands

Cyworld is the largest online community site in South Korea.It has more than 20 million members.Interestingly about 950,000 of its members are aged 50 or more.

Cyworld members reach 20 million

Yahoo! has just opened a new services - Pipes.

It allows everyone to process, remix and publish RSS content and implements a number of paradigms and design patterns:

• mashups
• pipelines a.k.a. pipes and filters design pattern
• a simple drag & drop GUI for building pipelines

This service allows people to combine a number of data sources (e.g., from existing RSS feeds) customised by user input and process them through a number of operators or filters. Resulting data are published as RSS feeds called Pipes. Users can share pipes, browse other's pipes and clone them into new pipes thus providing a nice introduction into "playing" with a web of RSS data.

Read more:
- Introduction to Pipes by Tim O'Reilly
- "Yahoo! Pipes: The Modules For Building Pipes" by Brady Forrest for more technical information

Followup:
- "Semantic Pipes and RSS" (coming soon)

Via Captsolo

Picture courtesy of Yahoo!

From January 2007’s issue of Physics World

"Talking physics on the Social Web"

After nearly two years, a cryptic treasure hunt played out between the real and virtual worlds has been won.
Andy Darley from the UK was one of 50,000 players who took part in the alternate reality game, Perplex City.
Gamers from 92 countries have solved clues on the web and around the world in a quest for the Receda Cube, an "artefact" buried in a hidden location.Mr Darley eventually tracked the object to a wood in Northamptonshire. Finding it nets him £100,000 ($200,000).

Via the BBC

Photo courtesy of the BBC

The net is facing the need for serious upgrades in order to meet fresh demands such as high definition video on the web and social networking.

A recent report from Deloitte said 2007 could be the year the internet approaches capacity, with demand outstripping supply. It predicted bottlenecks in some of the net's backbones as the amount of data overwhelms the size of the pipes.

On Tuesday last more than a million people watched a video clip of a friendly fire incident in Iraq via the website of the Sun newspaper, reflecting the explosion of interest in online video.

via the BBC

photo courtesy of  Spectris

Europe has begun rolling out its new research and development initiative - the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7).

FP7 will see more than 7bn euros (£4.6bn) a year handed to investigators to advance scientific knowledge and, by extension, boost the EU's economy.

It runs until 2013 and amounts to a significant jump in investment over previous community programmes.
UK Science Minister Malcolm Wicks told a launch event in London that Europe had to get smarter to stay competitive.

"Globalisation is the buzzword now; we are aware that we cannot compete on price alone in producing many of the goods that are made more cheaply in China, India and other emerging economies," he said.

Via the BBC

Photo courtesy of the BBC

The Seventh Framework Project

John Breslin is organising BarCamp Ireland 4. He has setup a Wiki for more details.

"Vodafone customers will now be able to access and update their MySpace websites from their mobile phone.Social networking website MySpace said the tie-up with the UK's largest mobile phone company was its first extension into Europe's mobile sector.Launching first in the UK, Vodafone Live! users will be able to download MySpace Mobile to their handsets.They will then be able to edit their MySpace profiles, post photos and blogs and send and receive MySpace messages.

"This partnership brings together the world's number one lifestyle portal and the world's leading mobile operator," said MySpace's Colin Digiaro."

via Semantic Bits

Photo courtesy of the BBC

The Second of John Breslin's guest posts' to the Irish Internet Association blog.

The Semantic Web: Web 3.0?

Photo courtesy of Wynia

The first of John Breslin's guest posts' to the Irish Internet Association's blog.

From Web 1.0 to Web 2.0.

Photo courtesy of Contentrobot.

Via Reuters in Second Life

" Weaponry,is a booming business in Second Life. Some weapons come as in-world objects, visible guns that you can attach to your hands and aim like a first-person-shooter game. Some come as invisible fields of code surrounding you. Defensive mechanisms will light up in a sphere around you like the shields of the starship Enterprise when you’re attacked. The range of weaponry is astonishing. There are lots of very basic free weapons available — you can get boxes full of them for nothing at places like Yadni’s Junkyard, and some of them even coded by Linden Labs employees."

Photo courtesy of Alphavilleherald.

Possibly old news for DERI researchers but interesting that the BBC is reporting on it finally and that tagging is getting the recognition that it deserves.

Tagging takes off for Web users

To Tag or not to tag

photo credit BBC